How 5G Will Change Online Marketing As We Know It

Jay is a digital marketer and producer whose creative and technical skills have developed digital brand strategies and sales campaigns using a range of complex internet applications from stand-alone websites through to Facebook API integrations.

The next generation of wireless is expected to take a huge leap by 2020. Despite it being only one generation higher than 4G, 5G networks are expected to be 66 times faster than 4G. Imagine being able to download a movie in 3 seconds rather than 6 minutes. 5G will do that – and much, much more.

How 5G will change our everyday lives

The higher performance 5th generation wireless is expected to come into full play by 2020, and it will take us to places we’ve never experienced before. Billions of sensors will be built into appliances, security systems, health monitors, wearables (smart watches) and numerous other gadgets.

The leap of speed that will be provided by 5G will allow self-driving cars to be fully efficient, video chats will feel like you’re in the same room with the person you’re talking to. Cities will be able to monitor traffic congestion, pollution levels and parking demands and feed that information into your smart car in real time.

Words just aren’t enough to create the hype 5G technology deserves, so I’ve included a video released by CNBC international in June of 2015. Have a look:

How 5G will change marketing

And there’s another reason to get excited about 5G and its contribution to new realities. 5G will push augmented reality and virtual reality into the mainstream – things like walking directions, product prices, hologram video chats, projecting data into car windshields to name a few. As a marketer, I can’t help but imagine how online marketing will seep into all this.

Just like with the mobile marketing sweep, Ads and campaigns will make their way to those screens as well. With 5G, download speeds will be 10Gbps, and self-driving cars will be able to process and react in real time. It’s going to connect the world in ways that seemed impossible before while bringing even more people and appliances online.

Online marketers, this just further confirms the reliance and need for all industries to invest in digital marketing strategies. It also confirms a new wave of platforms and outlets for inbound marketing (PPC campaigns, Ads, Customer Acquisition, Blogging in real time) that will come into play for the modern marketer.

How 5G will work

Over 20 global companies working on 5G are either competing or collaborating on research projects to get 5G up and going for all users in the next five years. It is estimated that by 2020 each user will consume around 1GB of data per day. Japan wants to play host not only to the 2020 Olympics games, but also to the world’s first commercial next generation network.

Let’s face it, at the moment it’s tricky to get more than a tweet out of a packed stadium with too many people all using the same “mast.” The decentralised nature of 5G could in effect provide each user with their own mast or more precisely, antennae. Using smaller millimetre wavelengths makes tight packing and super high frequency operations possible, 10x higher than our 4G handsets today – resulting in blistering data speeds. While current cell networks (3G/4G) use anywhere between 800-2500 MHz, the 5G system breaks the speed record with up to 73000 MHz (73GHz) of a wireless spectrum frequency that up until today have only been accessed for commercial and military operations. This permits the next generation network to tighten the gap between waves, allowing the elimination of delays and acceleration of transmission, opening the door to a new collection of real world applications.

The 5G future

So what will 5G mean for the online marketer? It means that there will be many more outlets for the world of Ads, content marketing and customer service. Although this technology is still tagged as “upcoming,” it’s important to always be open and innovative to what is about to come, especially when it comes to the “Internet of Things (IoT)“.

Being ahead of the game means prepping adequately and letting your imagination flow to start planning out possible strategies. With this type of forward thinking, your business will get that initial marketing foot one step ahead of the competition. And with the enhancement of such a tremendous upcoming mobile network generation update, the possibilities are seemingly endless.

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